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[Bryan Bishop]

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Subject: [tt] NS: Histories: Heroes for hard times
To: Transhuman Tech <tt at postbiota.org>


Histories: Heroes for hard times
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826541.700&print=true
* 30 April 2008
* Stephanie Pain

On 14 April 1950, British children woke up to find they had a
brand-new hero, Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Unlike Superman, the
square-jawed, pipe-smoking hero of the Eagle comic had no special
powers - just logic, decency and a touching faith in science and
technology. In his hands, they were a force for good. With a space
fleet he could travel to Venus to solve the global food crisis, and
with access to an automated food factory he could transform warlike
aliens into friendly ones, by swiftly doctoring their diet. Dan
Dare's aspirations mirrored those of British society: shattered by
the cost of the war, the nation looked to science and technology to
kick-start an industrial renaissance and bring prosperity and
increasing social justice. In the vanguard was Theo Williamson,
engineer of the future...

IN THE years following the second world war, the watchword across
the UK was austerity. War had left the nation crippled by debt. Food
remained rationed and housing was in such short supply that
thousands of families were installed in pre-fabricated homes made of
asbestos sheeting or war-surplus aluminium. Coal supplies had run so
low that the railways were forced to axe services, and car factories
remained closed for lack of steel. What wasn't in short supply was
optimism, inventiveness and a firm belief that things would soon get
better. And what was going to lift the nation out of austerity and
set it on the road to affluence was science and technology.

The war had prompted a great surge of innovation from which emerged
radar, the jet engine, computers, the atomic bomb and much more. The
plan now was to channel the brains and enthusiasm that had produced
those breakthroughs into creating high-tech industries and
world-beating products. New technologies would also breathe new life
into old industries.

Into this feverish atmosphere sprang Dan Dare, the very British hero
of the Eagle comic. His adventures were fantastical and his enemies
clichéd, but Dan Dare's world of spaceships, hovercars, satellites
and automated machines was not so far-fetched: few people doubted
that such technologies would soon exist. "Dan Dare embodied the
spirit of the time," says Andrew Nahum, head of the team that put
together Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain, a new exhibition
at London's Science Museum.

Unlike the cartoon hero, Theo Williamson was a real technological
hero - a visionary engineer who saw a way to achieve a new
industrial revolution. By the time the Eagle first landed on the
nation's doormats in April 1950, Williamson was a household name.

Williamson had been honing his electronics skills since childhood:
as a boy in the 1930s he designed circuits and built receivers,
transmitters and increasingly sophisticated amplifiers. In 1946,
with Williamson now a fully fledged engineer, the magazine Wireless
World published details of his latest amp. Far superior to anything
that had gone before, it was an instant hit. Tens of thousands of
people made the amp by following the instructions in the magazine.
One US company manufactured and sold 100,000 of them. Williamson had
unwittingly started the post-war craze for home-built hi-fi, a phase
that lasted well into the 1960s, when manufactured equipment of
similar quality became widely affordable.

Williamson's amp made him famous, but his real triumph was an
altogether more ambitious innovation with the potential to
revitalise the country's manufacturing industry. System 24, as he
called it, was an automated and flexible manufacturing system that
pre-empted today's computer-controlled factories by several decades.

Manufacturing was the main source of wealth in the UK, but many
industries appeared stuck in the 19th century, cutting and shaping
components from pieces of steel with hand-operated lathes, grinders,
milling machines and other heavyweight machine tools. It was part of
a proud tradition. Mass production had begun in the UK, at the naval
dockyard in Portsmouth. At the start of the 19th century, war with
France saw demand for ships' pulley blocks soar. Craftsmen cutting
and shaping blocks by hand couldn't meet the demand, and so in 1803
engineer Marc Brunel and tool-maker Henry Maudslay famously designed
and built a series of machines that would perform the 20 or so
stages of manufacture. All the workers had to do was load the raw
materials and pull a few levers.

Little had changed. There had been improvements to some machine
tools and factories had grown far larger, but they were still
organised on the same principle. The result, Williamson pointed out,
was "lines of milling machines and lines of lathes and lines of
drills and mounting stacks of parts between the lines, waiting to go
from machinist to machinist, each of whom has never seen it before,
and after carrying out one or two operations will never see it
again". To speed up production, workers had been reduced to
performing simple tasks, such as feeding a part into a machine or
drilling a hole, following instructions handed down by a remote
management while foremen exhorted them to work ever faster. The work
was mind-numbingly dull and there was little incentive to increase
productivity.

A radical overhaul was needed for industry to remain competitive.
System 24 was Williamson's answer: by combining the emerging
technologies of computing and digital control of machine tools,
factories could be organised in an entirely different way that would
be more flexible, more efficient and give people more satisfying
jobs.

Williamson got his chance to develop his grand idea in 1961 when he
was hired by a company called Molins that manufactured
cigarette-making machines. For the company's new line of machines,
Williamson introduced digital control systems; more radically, he
persuaded Molins to switch to materials such as aluminium alloys and
plastics, which were easier, quicker and cheaper to cut. Soon it was
making machines that turned out cigarettes at twice the speed of
previous models. Then medical research suggested smoking was
unhealthy, and for a while the tobacco companies worried that the
government might ban it. Molins wisely decided to branch out and
Williamson persuaded the company to let him work on his brainchild,
System 24 (see picture, top left).

The concept was revolutionary. A small digital computer controlled
up to 28 machine tools and a series of conveyor belts that ferried
parts from one machine to the next. The system carried out quality
control of the parts automatically, adjusting the settings of
milling machines and changing worn cutters.

Williamson's concept wasn't just about the technology, though. It
was about what he believed was the real route to efficiency:
reorganising production to put responsibility back in the hands of
the workers and making their jobs more rewarding. System 24 was
designed to operate as a series of "cells". Instead of having groups
of identical machine tools, each cell contained all the different
types of machine needed to complete an entire process, in effect
replacing the giant production line with many smaller ones. It would
operate round the clock, requiring a single daytime shift and then
running unattended through the night. With a small team running each
cell, staff would do a range of jobs on different types of machine,
make decisions, solve problems and see something come of their
efforts.

The project attracted a lot of attention, not only from the Ministry
of Technology but also from other companies which invested
considerable amounts in it. The first complete system was built in
1968 for IBM, but it was to be the only one. The following year,
System 24 was abandoned. Molins feared the mounting costs would
frighten shareholders. The idea was always going to be difficult to
sell to British firms, says Ben Russell, curator of mechanical
engineering and manufacture at the Science Museum. "Many
manufacturing companies tended to be conservative and reluctant to
change. They were suspicious of the lighter, newer materials
championed by Williamson and they had already invested heavily in
more traditional machinery. No one wanted to replace it unless
absolutely necessary."

The US and Japan immediately saw the advantages of System 24 and
built on the concept to develop cheaper, more reliable production
systems. In the UK, industrial relations deteriorated. Williamson
had predicted that "if the pride and satisfaction of achievement is
removed, leaving only the pay packet, it is not surprising that
maximising it becomes a mainstream occupation". He was right. The
1970s saw mass walkouts and lightning strikes. Industry resisted
change until the 1990s, when recession forced companies to adapt or
go out of business. "Industry had to change if it was to survive,"
says Russell. "Williamson was just too far ahead of his time."
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